In 1947, Boys Town founder Father Edward Flanagan, at the request of President Harry Truman, went to Japan to help war orphans.
“He actually visited Nagasaki, Hiroshima, saw children injured from the bombing, and then he saw children that were homeless, they’re living in sewers, and no one was taking care of them, and he knew there was a great need,” said Tom Lynch, Boys Town historian.
The Japanese government and the Allied Forces did not know what to do with these children. So, they looked to Flanagan. Father Flanagan created a report called “Children of Defeat,” and it detailed how they could create homes just like Boys Town with schools, dormitories, and programs to help the children.
A Japanese delegation paid a visit to Boys Town. They’ve been working with officials here for more than 20 years. The government changed its child welfare program from an institutional model to a group home model. They came here to check out the Boys Town system.
“After that, we realized that the system that Boys Town has is a little more advanced and complicated, so we talked with them and found out the common sense parenting works as a perfect fit for us,” said Dr. Yasuhiko Richard Kuyama, a child advocate. “The importance of common-sense parenting for us was to prevent child abuse.”
“Common sense parenting is a model developed at Boys Town to help parents really fill that role as their child’s first teacher. They are the ones that are there every day teaching their kids,” said Steph Jensen with Boys Town.
Kuyama says getting parents to accept those changes is necessary because the Japanese family structure has changed.
“The old Japanese family with grandparents, father, mother, typical nuclear family doesn’t exist anymore. Two working parents, and most of them are working hard, so they have no time to spend time with kids,” he said.
Japanese officials say they have also developed after-school programs where children learn social skills, taking pressure off their parents.
“So that’s a very important part because if kids know how to work with social skills parents work with them that is going to change whole game, reporter says so its working ..it’s working,” Kuyama said.
What Flanagan started in Japan decades ago speaks volumes for the work being done on the Boys Town campus.
“I think that it says what Father Flanagan started continues on in his beliefs that there’s no such thing as a bad child. There are no bad kids, it’s just maybe bad teaching, bad examples, and filling those needs is going to change the lives of kids, and that continues on,” Jensen said.
Kuyama said they are teaching the Boys Town common sense parenting model in Japan, training around 2,000 people a year.
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